Keep running Ubuntu for servers, even consider using Pro if pricing is suitable for your use case. 10 years of support is pretty good these days.
As for desktop: Arch Linux if you like tinkering and need "bleeding edge" software; use Fedora Linux, if you want to be on "leading edge", and want system that you install and it just works; Debian for something more stable. Linux Mint is decent too, but their plan for Wayland is not known yet, if that's something that important for you.
Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
191–200 of 345 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#192Red Hat for enterprise use, Fedora for personal desktop use. One of the largest communities you’ll find. If you want Debian based maybe just straight Debian. The centos debacle was poorly handled but I think what red hat was /trying/ to do made sense. The community just wasn’t there to sustain it. Red Hat was paying to give away free RHEL basically lol. CentOS Stream should have just been called RHEL Stream. It’s bas…
Fedora should not be recommended anymore for personal desktop use for the simple reason that they removed hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding support. Must all run on the CPU now.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Fedora disabled hardware video decoding support in their Mesa builds, which mostly affects AMD GPUs. Intel has hardware video decoding in the GPU driver (or in the firmware or wherever), and it's not dependent on Mesa having it enabled. NVidia of course does its own thing.
It's still a shame for AMD GPU users, of course, although understandable from the point of view of legal risk management.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#193A lot of people mentioning Debian. Great distro. If you're comfortable with Debian, you might as well check out Arch too. Can't go wrong with either one.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#194OpenSuse Leap
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#195Red Hat for enterprise use, Fedora for personal desktop use. One of the largest communities you’ll find. If you want Debian based maybe just straight Debian. The centos debacle was poorly handled but I think what red hat was /trying/ to do made sense. The community just wasn’t there to sustain it. Red Hat was paying to give away free RHEL basically lol. CentOS Stream should have just been called RHEL Stream. It’s bas…
I just moved over from Ubuntu to Fedora as I felt I was starting to lose my edge: apt is so easy you forget that the other half of the universe thinks in dnf and I need to keep my skills sharp. Its been a good decision.
A bad decision was to use a Fedora mix with KDE. It works very well, but I think its rough edges would simply not be there if I'd chosen the GNOME path. You get the sense that the RH team default to GNOME and KDE is an afterthought. Which is fine by me, but its a bit of a shame, cos I much prefer it.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#196For what it's worth, I was expecting this to be mostly about desktops. Presently I'll throw some love to MX Linux, which appears to be a good example for "Just works."
Broadly, this is feeling more and more like a cycle that one can figure out how to "ride?" As, before for me it has been e.g. Lubuntu, Xubuntu, LXLE, etc. Basically something like "find something Debian-ish" that there's a little bit of, but not TOO much, new energy by people who just want something simple.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comes full circle as Ubuntu is derived from Debian
As somebody said, "Ubuntu is Debian-based the same way milk is grass-based".
ubuntu started out as "debian, but with more up to date packages and some light polish."
as a long time debian user in the 90s, ubuntu was an exciting new step for debian based distros.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#198I've been running FreeBSD for all my production stuff for 20+ years. Works great, stable, consistent, reliable. Give it a try.
The BSDs are criminally underrated operating systems. Another great thing about FreeBSD is that there is robust support for compiling from source (the ports system) or using binary packages. It also fully supports ZFS out of the box.
I also highly recommend FreeBSD’s cousin OpenBSD if you have supported hardware. It’s default out of the box configuration is extremely secure and bloat-free.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#199For me it was Archlinux.
Listen Ubuntu. You rely on third party packages and don't really mind to fix them, just bounce users upstream.
Yes, you are based upon Debian. You cannot fix "their" bugs. You should, instead, because those are your users'.
Archlinux is far from perfect, but nearer than you, Ubuntu.
Re: Ask HN: What Next After Ubuntu?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't like the design at a fundamental level. It feels brittle, bloated, and not very unixy. I'd rather have my init system be a handful of microscopic executables, using text files or symlinks for configuration and text files for logging. I don't like everything depending on systemd it feels like too much complexity at the wrong part of the stack. It doesn't jive with my sense of architecture, it's not well design…
Systemd had no shortage of issues, but: > text files or symlinks for configuration and text files for logging. Systemd gets this right and arguably pushed the whole ecosystem in this direction. The old rc scripts could barely be considered a text file and symlink configuration system — they were a pile of text files containing a miserable combination of code and configuration mixed together, along with a very simple…
I agree with (basically) all of this, the larger point. I'll note that I said "or"... ;-) (CYA)
I'm not sure what the "right" solution looks like, perhaps a directory of TOML or JSON files. Perhaps the aforementioned + executable shell scripts with predictable naming? handwave handwave as long as it's "UNIXy". (consist of easy to edit text & not invent a new anything & be composed of pieces which do one thing well)